What a New Years week, I believe I have the flu.  Started feeling bad on New Years eve and ended up in the hospital four days later.  Have you been so sick that going to the hospital actually made you feel relieved?

I was glad Alice took me by cab to the Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital.  We stood in a line outside the hospital building to get an entrance ID card.  It’s a cold little room with plastic flaps for doors, everyone bundled up and in compressed lines waiting on women in surgical masks to make your card.  I was handed a card with my name on it: 苏珊 Yes those 2 Chinese characters say Susan, no last name needed.   Cost 1 yuan.  Then we queued up to get an appointment with the doctor.  Must have been 10 lines of people in the hospital foyer.  When I walked in, could have sworn it was a train station, people in hats, scarfs, gloves and jackets lined up to pay on one side and the other side for appointments.  Not very warm in here, someone needs to turn the heat on.

We are sent to the third floor, a large lobby which Alice bypasses.  She walks directly  into one of the many rooms skirting the lobby.  The one she picks has three white coated doctors who are examining people at computer station desks.  We stood behind a sick elderly man with his concerned son and mom.  They were trying to get him admitted, but no rooms.  My turn I plopped on the official old wooden examining stool.  I was asked some questions by a lady doctor in a white trench coat and a pale blue surgical mask.  Alice translated.  Now I need to have my temperature taken.  We walked back to the third floor lobby, another train station waiting room, cold bench like seats and many sick people.  The nurse in her dingy white more of a dull grey nurse uniform and old fashioned white hat pinned to her head handed me a thermometer which I was to return to her in three minutes.  While Alice was tending to me and ran to get a book to record my medical information I realized these nurses had the same kind of nursing hats my mom wore in the 1960’s .  My mom always told me if the hats don’t have a black strip then they aren’t registered nurses.  No one had a black strip so what kind of nurses are these?

No temperature the unregistered nurse said, back to the lady doctor we go.  Waiting behind another sick person on the wooden stool, I notice how dingy this place is.  It looks like Cox Junior High School, where I went to middle school, some forty years ago, a building as old as Methuselah, back then.  I can still smell the old stairwells, dank with bathroom odor.   I sit down and this time she wants to listen to my heart, no need to take off two sweaters with twenty people in the room, just listen right through the woolen garments.  Next she wants to look down my throat but the light is bad, she walks  behind me and motions for me to swizzle around.  I do, to see a half a dozen sick Chinese people standing and looking at me.  I open my mouth, she compresses my tongue with a stick, she and the Chinese look down my throat!  Quite an experience, one burned into the recesses of my mind.

Now we need blood, off to another floor, another queue, another  form and pay three yuan for a blood test.  Take a number and then wait for one of ten lines to have blood removed.  My number is flashing atop of a window with a person underneath who draws blood.  My arm is placed on a pile of  disposable papers, tourniquet tightened, needle the size of a hose and I get a stick.  I forgot to tell someone, I pass out at the site of blood.  “Turn my head, turn my head!,” I say to myself.  All done, compress firmly with two Qtips and orange yellow substance on my arm. What happened to tiny needles and alcohol?   We sit in one of many cold metal chairs awaiting the results which will be retrieved  from the computerized ATM-like machine using my ID card in twenty minutes.  I am pondering the floor about now, and thinking when was the last time this was mopped?  Do they know what disinfectant is?  The patterns are nice on the tiles and other ridiculous mind roaming thoughts.   Suddenly Alice is up and getting the results, which are printed when she inserts my card.

Returning to the third floor and back to the not so private doctors room, and another line.  Alice is listening to the sick people in front of me, turning to translate their woes.  My turn, back to the old familiar stool, this time she writes all kinds of chicken scratch in my booklet that Alice got for me.  Chinese doctors write as bad as American doctors, one thing in common.   She has read my blood report and I have a bacterial infection, the flu or something.  I will need a round of  antibiotics, aspirin and cough syrup.  Diagnosed and down to the first floor where the pharmacy is located.  Hand my prescription to another white coated personal and with in minutes, I hear “su-san, su-san’  It’s my name, I can understand Chinese!  I get my prescriptions and out to pay.  Another queue and 130 RMB, cheap…. Lets go home and too bed.

Socialized medicine in China…. Obama come check it out!